Systems and methods herein generally relate to machines having print engines such as printers and/or copier devices and, more particularly, to printer color management in image/text printing.
Printing presses (e. g., a digital front end (DFE) press) may be used in various printing systems and/or organizations for high volume printing. These printers are often designed to handle large customer workflows (e.g., thousands of copies of full-color magazines or brochures). A document can be created or received in electronic form on a device such as a personal computer, a personal digital assistant, or other suitable device. Raster image processing may be performed on very large print jobs during the printing of very large documents. Specifically, a document may be embodied in one of a number of page description languages that must be converted into raster bits in order to drive a printing device to print the various pixels, etc., on a page. Raster image processing may be performed, for example, by print engines associated with the printing presses.
Parameters of print jobs (such as for finishing, imposition, color management) can be set at the print queue, print job, page description language (PDL) creation, exception page creation, line printer remote (LPR), and job ticket level. Imposition settings are job settings that cause page images to be placed on print media at specific locations, orientations, and scalings. Typically, a user can format the document, adjust the layout of the document, change fonts, change font sizes, etc. For example, printing or rendering a surface on a sheet of print media using a user specified colorant order has been an existing and well-used feature in heavy production printing houses. In some cases, a spot color may be added before the standard color gamut (e.g., Gold+CMYK). In other cases, a spot color may be added after the standard color gamut (e.g., CMYK+Silver). However, it has been observed that if a single surface has different logical pages and the different logical pages require different print colorant order, then there is no design currently available to render images on the same side of a sheet using different print colorant orders. For instance, given X and Z as any spot color, a user may want one logical page on a sheet to be printed as X+CMYK+Z and another logical page on the same sheet to be printed as Z+CMYK+X in a single surface.
A need exists for a system and method that enables printing of multiple logical pages on a single sheet using different print colorant orders.